The main architect of the concept of perestroika under Gorbachev, Alexander N. Yakovlev played a unique role in the transformation of the Soviet Union. Drawing on his own experiences and on his privileged access to state and Party archives, he reflects on the evils of the system that shaped the country he loves. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
During the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate.
The Forsaken is a remarkable piece of forgotten history—the never-before-told story of Americans lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives, only to meet tragic ends.
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labor camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin from 1924 to 1953. Various sections of the three volumes describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims by Soviet authorities over four decades.
The Case for Democracy is a passionate, controversial argument against compromises on the road to freedom, by the renowned former dissident, human rights activist and Jewish leader Natan Sharansky.
Fear No Evil is the classic, inspiring memoir of a political dissident—a man whose fierce spirit and drive for freedom triumphed over imprisonment, solitary confinement, the Soviet Union, and Communism itself.
In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. “An engrossing and essential addition to the human and political literature of our time"—The New York Times. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Between 1937 and 1949, Joseph Stalin deported more than two million people of 13 nationalities from their homelands to remote areas of the U.S.S.R. His regime perfected the crime of ethnic cleansing as an adjunct to its security policy during those decades. Based upon material recently released from Soviet archives, this study describes the mass deportation of these minorities, their conditions in exile, and their eventual release.
With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime’s scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state.
The Russian Revolution is ground-breaking in its inclusiveness and enthralling in its narrative of a movement whose purpose, in the words of Leon Trotsky, was "to overthrow the world." Richard Pipes argues convincingly that the Russian Revolution was an intellectual, rather than a class, uprising; that it was steeped in terror from its very outset; and that it was not a revolution at all but a coup d'etat—"the capture of governmental power by a small minority." (From description on publisher’s web site.)
